SIGGRAPH Art Gallery

Acrobats by Melissa Harshman is an ink-jet print whose individual objects portray a single, related concept. The acrobats serve as a metaphor for the daily balancing act humans perform each day, while the movie starlets, numerical calculations, and

Noise Control by Anna Ursyn is a photographic silk screen that reflects the commonal-ity of the technological and human worlds through the placement of various elements and concepts. This cityscape illustrates how humans affect their environment, w

When Sue Gollifer was named chair of the SIGGRAPH 2004 Art Gallery, she was determined to select a title for the gallery that was contemporary and described the theme of this year's exhibits: works that stimulate and explore new connections—technological, aesthetic, and critical—among the senses. She chose Synaesthesia, which, by definition, is an involuntary cross-modal association whereby the stimulation of one sense prompts the stimulation of another sense.

Illustrating this theme, the gallery will feature 2D, 3D, interactive, multimedia, telecommunications, installation-based, and screen-based (online) works that viewers can see, hear, touch, or smell. "I wanted to focus on how artists can excite the senses through a range of technologies," says Gollifer, an artist and principal lecturer of fine art at the University of Brighton in the UK.

The exhibit, on display during the annual ACM SIGGRAPH conference and exhibition, contains more than 150 juried selections from a record number of 850 submissions. The featured works, created by established and novice artists alike, were produced using various techniques, from high-tech 3D computer graphics to low-tech digital plotters. "Our jury of industry professionals looked for interesting, thought-provoking images and installations that reflected a range of work and technologies," says Gollifer of the vetting process.

Gollifer, the first European to chair the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, has worked to raise the profile of the conference and the gallery throughout Europe. As a result of her efforts, the prestigious Ars Electronica conference, held annually in Linz, Austria, has agreed to display prize-winning exhibits from its 2003 show in the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, as part of Ars Electronica's 25th anniversary celebration.

Moreover, this year's gallery, in collaboration with the SIGGRAPH 2004 Computer Animation Festival, Emerging Technologies, Sketches, and Web Graphics, will provide artists with a wider forum to exhibit and discuss their work. In addition to displaying the numerous art pieces, the gallery will show 18 experimental and art/design animations that are part of the "umbrella" Computer Animation Festival. Submitted by the festival chair, these animations similarly reflect the gallery's Synaesthesia theme. Two of the animations will be featured in the Animation Festival as well.

Also presented in the gallery will be six critical art essays: "The Kitchen as a Graphical User Interface" by research assistant Leonardo Bonanni of MIT; "Sensational Technologies" by Annet Dekker of The Netherlands Media Art; "Studies in Audio/Visual Digital Art" by Ernest Edmonds of the University of Technology, Sydney; "Interface as Image: Image Making and Mixed Reality" by Ian Gwilt of the University of Technology, Sydney; "The Noetic Connection: Synesthesia, Psychedelics, and Language" by Diana Slattery of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and "Thoughts on Hesse, Digital Art and Visual Music" by Bruce Wands of the School of Visual Arts.

Adding to these gallery offerings will be three artist roundtable discussions, scheduled during the conference. The Art Gallery will be open to show attendees Sunday, August 8, through Thursday, August 12.

A sampling of the works from the gallery is shown on these four pages. —Karen Moltenbrey

CORE-CELL Tower by Yoichiro Kawaguchi comprises as many as 20 renticular images, including this one, which are contained within a light box. Each image is a representation of a single image viewed from slightly different viewpoints and then placed on different faces of a tower. The result is a mixture of spatial effect and false illusion representing artistic impression in 3D photography. The ensuing dizziness, a consequence of viewing the abstract patterns, is intended to amplify the effect of spatial awareness.

Dusk of Shattered Icons by Quintin Gonzalez is a digital print series created in Poser, Painter, and Photoshop that delves into the metamorphosis of the human identity. These guises have been blurred into a transfixed moment that signifies the pass

Red streamlines by Mark Stock is a digital print that investigates the essential character of wavy, rotation-dominated flow in water, air, and other matter. The image contains 1000 streamlines in a fluid-like flow, which were calculated using an al

Poetics of Migration #2 by Phillip George is one image in a series of metallic laser prints, each of which is a composite of multiple layers of imagery collected by the artists during years of traveling around the world.

seri_C_D1 by Floyd Gillis is one of 10 prints that echo some of the pen and ink compositions of the late 1970s and '80s whose elements combine to form a dynamic arrangement that not only continues to move on the page, but also reflects the feeling

Worley Basin by Dylan Sisson was generated within Pixar's Slim as a single procedural shader and rendered as a shader swatch applied to a flat plane. Each shader contains many layers of simple procedural functions, like Worley and turbulence, that result in simple, non-repeating patterns. These were then sized by manipulating the surface parameterization, mapped to color and layer opacity, and adjusted through other methods. No painting, digital or otherwise, occurred during the process.

Polloi by Philip Sanders comprises a series of ink-jet prints from Koi, an interactive panoramic painting that investigates the relationship between the perceptual, phenomenal, and conceptual worlds. The panorama is a digital synthesis of realistic

2003.4a and 2003.4b by Kenneth A. Huff represent a series of digital images on color photographic paper that were inspired by forms and patterns that appear in nature. The images were generated in Maya and custom software. The final renderings were

Solar Self Portrait by Jeffrey Guhde is a solar self-portrait print made by a microcontroller that uses a computer program to detect the light from the sun, which in turn controls drive motors on a stylus that moves along the ground to produce a ch

geo_04 by Keith Brown is a rapid-prototype sculpture that embraces a range of digital activities, both virtual and actual. Designed in 3ds max and output using a subtractive method, the resulting object represents a sculptural form that could not b

Yellow Boat by Peter Hardie is a computer-generated print created in Softimage, with Photoshop used to paint the reflective sky. The work focuses on a yellow boat on a river at a point where the interplay among the ripples, caustics from the water,